by Poppy Brite
Gumbo kicked off the second set with a thrash-tempo version of the old Cajun song “Paper in My Shoe.” Zach shouted what lyrics he knew over a pileup of guitar and drum noise and made up the rest, grinning between the rapid-fire lines. He had never been able to stand Cajun music when he lived in New Orleans. But singing this song here in this club was like going home again.
The crowd was dancing hard. From the stage they looked like nothing but a seething, bobbing mass of heads, waving hands, blissed-out faces. Zach noticed that the beautiful red-haired boy was still at front and center, but he had switched his attention to Calvin. The guitarist kept making eye contact with the boy, playing to him. The boy was dancing so hard that his white shirt had gone transparent with sweat. Zach could see the pink points of his nipples through the drenched cotton.
See, Zach felt like telling Calvin, you’re a knockout, you have drugs, you play guitar in a hot band. You couldn’t go home alone tonight if you wanted to.
They eased into another jam, this one slow, dark, and nasty. The V-neck of the boy’s shirt had slipped down, exposing one pale shoulder. Several girls in front were wearing skimpy tank tops, and as they danced their slender arms swayed in the air like branches. Zach found himself thinking about skin. It could be a fabulously erotic substance, smooth under the hands, salty against the tongue. Its color could inspire hatred. It could be flayed and tanned.
He gripped the microphone, leaned forward until his lips were almost touching it. “Dressin’ up at night in his suit of skin … Cured her ribs in the barn … Fried up her heart in a skillet … Put her ole hands in a jar …”
He caught Trevor laughing in the audience, eyes squeezed shut, mouth wide open: a completely unself-conscious moment. Zach let his lips brush the mike. “Ooooh Ed,” he moaned, “what’d you do with her head?”
The kids loved it. Zach hung on the mike stand, threw in a few sultry bars of “Summertime.” Gonna spread your wings, take to the sky …
Too soon they came to the last song. Zach threw himself into it hard, ended up on his knees clutching the mike, howling into it, forcing every bit of air from his lungs, reaching deep into his soul for those blues. Who knew when he would sing for an audience again? He had to make this time good enough to last.
Then it was over. He was backstage, listening to the roar of the crowd through the thin wall. Terry, R.J., and Calvin were slapping his back, congratulating him, assuring him of a gig if he decided to stick around town. After they got high again, the others went out to start packing up their equipment, and Zach found Trevor standing alone at the edge of the crowd.
They lingered in the bar for a while. Soon the other band members drifted in to bask in the post-performance attention. Friends milled around, hoping to be drawn into the circle. Kids approached them with compliments, smiles, hungry eyes.
Zach saw Calvin talking to the boy who had been dancing in front of the stage. The boy’s face was as delicately shaded as a watercolor painting: eyelashes the same red-gold as his hair, pale pink lips, the faintest of lavender hollows above and below his eyes. He made a grand gesture with his hand, lowered his eyelids disdainfully. “I don’t know,” Zach heard him say. “Last time I did mushrooms they were old and made me sick.”
“These are real fresh,” Calvin assured him. “I grew ’em myself.”
“Well …” The boy’s eyes tilted up to meet Calvin’s. “I guess I will.” He smiled.
“Come on backstage with me. We’ll do you up real good.”
Zach watched them leave the bar together. The thought of those two exquisite creatures having mad hallucinatory sex made him happy for some reason. He looked at Trevor sitting next to him and thought about having some mad hallucinatory sex of his own.
“You want to get out of here soon?” he asked, and couldn’t help laughing when Trevor looked absurdly grateful.
Back at the house, Trevor and Zach sat at the kitchen table drinking tapwater from freshly washed glasses. Only a rusty trickle had come out of the faucet at first, but when they left it running for a few minutes it turned into a clear, steady stream. Zach couldn’t help remembering the rotten blood and ropy sperm gushing from the bathroom tap, but the kitchen water looked and tasted fine.
The mushrooms lay on the table in front of them, next to the computer, still half-swathed in a twist of Sacred Yew toilet paper. Both boys kept glancing at them from time to time, Trevor with intrigued trepidation, Zach with a sort of patient lust.
As soon as they got home, they had gone through the house turning on lights in all the safe rooms—the kitchen, the big bedroom, Trevor’s bedroom, the studio. Even the hall light was burning. Though it was well past midnight, the house felt almost cozy.
Zach couldn’t stop talking about the show, “As soon as I hit that stage,” he told Trevor, “I felt like I was born there. I haven’t felt born to anything since the first time I touched a computer. What am I gonna do, Trev? Maybe I could disguise myself and become a famous rock star. Like the guy in that movie Angel Heart, but in reverse, without amnesia. It’d be the perfect cover!”
“But the guy in Angel Heart sold his soul to the Devil.”
“I don’t have a problem with that.” Zach fingered a mushroom cap, watched a few dark spores sift onto the tabletop. “You know, I really want to eat some of these.”
“Eat ’em, then.”
“Are you going to do any?”
“Well …” Trevor shifted in his chair. “What exactly happens? Is it like getting stoned?”
“No, it’s much more intense. Scarier, your first time. But you’ll see all kinds of beautiful hallucinations and feel all kinds of weird physical sensations and have fucked-up thoughts and ideas.”
“Sounds kind of like sex.”
“We can do that too.”
“Do you think it could make me see things that are always here, but that I can’t see now?”
“Like what? You mean here in the house?”
Trevor nodded.
Zach took a deep breath. “Trev … I don’t think we ought to stay in the house too long after we dose. I thought we could go over to Terry’s. They ate theirs at the club, so they’ll be up all night, and I bet Terry would let us use his spare room. I don’t know if I’m into tripping here.”
Trevor just looked at him.
“What?” said Zach at last.
“This is a hallucinogen we’re talking about, right? A mind-expanding, consciousness-altering drug?”
Zach nodded.
“Okay then. Keeping in mind what I came here for, what I’m living in this house for, do you really think I’d consider doing it anywhere else?”
“I guess not,” Zach said quietly, “But, Trevor, I think it’s a real bad idea.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know I’m going to have to leave soon. And I know you must have at least thought about going with me.”
“So?”
“So maybe it doesn’t want you to leave.”
“Maybe I don’t want to.”
The words stung like a slap. “If you stay here,” Zach began, then had to stop and take a deep breath. His voice had nearly cracked. “If you stay here, it’ll be hard to get back in touch with you. I might not be able to do it.”
“You could leave a message for me at the club.”
“If They find out I was ever in this town, They could tap the club’s phone. They could make trouble for Kinsey. They could tap Terry’s phone. They could harass the fuck out of you. A lot of real scary people are after me, Trev. I’ve already left too many traces here. I have to disappear for good now, and you might never be able to find me again. Is that what you want?”
Trevor had been staring stubbornly at the table. Now he looked up at Zach. His eyes shimmered with tears about to spill over. “No.”
“Neither do I.” Is it true? thought Zach. Am I telling him this in good faith? If I’m going on the run forever, do I really want to take someone with me?
And the answer
was a resounding yes. Because he not only wanted to, he had to. If he didn’t take Trevor, he might as well leave his brain or his heart behind. It was that simple; that was how deeply people became grafted into you when you loved them like this.
A part of Zach still hated that.
A part of him was grateful that he had at least found the right Siamese twin.
And a part of him rejoiced that this was possible after all.
Their fingers intertwined on the tabletop. They gripped hands tightly for a moment, both fighting back tears. “You could stay here for a while, then go over to Terry’s,” Trevor said. “I wouldn’t mind being alone.”
“No way. You don’t want to trip alone in this house.”
“I don’t mind.”
“You would.” Zach pulled back to look into Trevor’s eyes. “Believe me. You would. You may be able to deal with the house, but I know psilocybin. I’m not letting you do that.”
“Then stay.”
“Okay.” Zach let his head fall back onto Trevor’s shoulder. I’ve just agreed to trip on mushrooms in a haunted house, he thought. The Grand Adventures of Zachary Bosch … reel three.
“So,” said Trevor, “how do we do it? Do we just eat them?”
“Yes. And I warn you, they taste fucking horrible.”
Trevor picked up a blue-streaked stem and nibbled experimentally at it. “They don’t seem to taste like much of anything.”
“Just you wait.”
Zach got up and refilled their water glasses, then began to portion out the mushrooms. There were seven caps and five stems. The caps were the most potent and shittiest-tasting part. He put three caps and three stems in one pile, four caps and two stems in the other.
“Now what?” Trevor asked.
“Getting nervous?”
“No.”
“Then let’s eat.”
Each of them picked up a cap, put it in his mouth, and began to chew. Zach’s cap splintered and grew soggy in his mouth. The dry dead flavor trickled between his teeth, over his tongue. He washed it down with a gulp of water.
“I see what you mean,” said Trevor after a few seconds.
“You don’t have to chew them all the way. Just soften ’em up a little and swallow the chunks.”
“Now you tell me.” Trevor drained his water glass and got up for more. “God, that’s disgusting. It’s like chewing on mummified flesh.”
“Better lose that thought. You’ve got five more pieces to eat.”
Crunching, grimacing, and swigging water, they choked down the rest of their mushrooms, then brushed their teeth at the sink. “How long does it take?” Trevor asked.
“Twenty, thirty minutes. Shall we smoke a joint and get in bed?”
“Are you sure we ought to be stoned?”
“Yes.” Zach nodded vigorously. “Under the circumstances, I’m very sure.”
Trevor felt the first tickling tendrils of the drug twenty minutes later. Zach was lying half on top of him with his head on Trevor’s chest. They had been talking in the darkened bedroom, a meandering conversation with pools of calm clear silence here and there. It was during one of these silences that the sensation seemed to begin in Trevor’s stomach and spread, shivering through his guts, swirling slyly through his blood, up his spine, into his brain.
He felt Zach’s lips move against his chest. “Do you feel it?”
“Yes.”
“Are you hallucinating?”
“I don’t think so.” Trevor looked at the shadows cast on the ceiling. Veins of pink and purple light were pulsing through them, beginning to creep down the walls. “Well, maybe.”
He pulled Zach up to him, cupped Zach’s head between his hands, and kissed his closed eyelids. The smudges of shadow beneath Zach’s eyes were dark with eyeliner and fatigue. Trevor brushed his lips across them, felt Zach shiver. He kissed Zach’s forehead, the narrow bridge of his nose and its elegant pointed tip, his willing mouth.
Kissing soon became a hallucinatory experience in itself. The interplay of their tongues was like a dance. Zach’s mouth tasted of mint toothpaste and pot smoke and what Trevor had come to think of as his lover’s own flavor, peppery and faintly sweet. Zach’s very skin seemed to undulate against him at every point of contact. Trevor imagined it becoming soft as warm caramel and flowing over him, surrounding him. Whether Zach’s body was taking him in or being assimilated itself would not matter. Their flesh would mingle, their bones would merge into one complex cradle surrounding the stew of their viscera. What a drawing it would make!
Now Zach was running his tongue along the arc of Trevor’s collarbone, leaving a trail of warm wetness that quickly turned cold as it evaporated. He rubbed his face on Trevor’s chest, pressed his lips into the hollow just below Trevor’s ribs. Trevor felt that bright band of energy connecting them again, as elusive and yet as constant as the particles and waves that made up light, sound, matter.
The room was swarming around him. His drawings waved gently from the walls. The mattress felt insubstantial under his back, as if it were suspended above a great gaping hole that went through the floor and the foundation of the house, as if it could dissolve at any moment and leave him plunging forever, alone in a numb black void, a blank universe. Trevor gasped and clutched Zach tight. It was beginning in earnest.
“It’s okay,” Zach soothed him. “These are strong ’shrooms, that’s all. Keep hanging on to me and you’ll be fine.”
“Do you … can you …” Trevor had no idea what he wanted to ask. His teeth began to chatter.
“Trev, just relax and go with it. Look at the lights. Everything feels good. I love you.”
“I love you too … but it’s so strange …”
“It’s supposed to be strange. That’s why we do drugs; they make us feel different. Don’t fight it.”
Zach stroked Trevor’s hair, rubbed his arms and shoulders until the muscles began to unbunch. Trevor’s hands had curled into loose fists. Zach coaxed them open, kissed the mirror-image maps of the palms, the pencil-calluses, the intricate whorls of the fingertips. He took a finger into his mouth and sucked softly, heard Trevor’s breath catch.
“Your tongue feels like velvet.”
“Your hands taste like seawater.”
Zach kissed the fold of Trevor’s left wrist, then ran his tongue along the forearm and into the soft hollow of the elbow. Trevor sighed and relaxed a little, though his pulse still beat like a frightened bird against Zach’s tongue. The veins of the inner elbow: the junkie veins, the veins to sever if you wanted to bleed to death.
Zach slid his mouth down Trevor’s arm and kissed the raised white lines of his scars. He had hesitated to do this before, unsure if Trevor would mind. Now the scars’ rippled texture was so appealing that he couldn’t help himself. Zach imagined the razor going through Trevor’s flesh smooth as butter, Trevor’s icy eyes screaming out of his impassive face as he watched the blood well up.
Trevor made a soft moaning sound deep in his throat. Zach sucked harder at the tender flesh, and the scar he was kissing opened against his tongue like a torrid kiss. The coppery taste of fresh blood spilled into his mouth.
Trevor felt a silvery stinging sensation in his arm, then another and another, then three at once, a deep bone-shivering pain. He raised himself on his right elbow, saw the old cuts on his left arm opening, parting like little red mouths. Zach stared up at him in confusion, then in horror as he realized Trevor was seeing the blood too. Deep wet crimson ringed his mouth and streaked his face, shocking against the whiteness of his skin.
“Trev? What …?”
Trevor felt weirdly serene. The open wounds hurt no more than they had when he’d made them. It was, rather, a way of draining off pain. He remembered the feeling so well now. “It’s nearly here,” he said.
“What?”
“Birdland.”
Zach’s pupils were enormous, glittering. His mouth hung slightly open. Trevor took his hands, pulled him up and held him, smearing
Zach’s body with blood. He kissed Zach’s sticky lips. “Don’t be scared.”
“But … aren’t you bleeding?”
“Only for a little while.”
“Trevor! Have your stigmata, then, goddammit, but don’t pull this mystical shit on me!” Zach pounded the mattress. “Don’t you dare die—if you die, I swear to God I’ll come after you—I’ll hunt you down and haunt your damn ghost—”
“I’m not dying. Come here. Hold me.” He wrapped his arms tighter around Zach, felt the blood flowing between them, trickling down Zach’s spine. I have to go, he thought. You’re the only thing that will bring me back. But that would just frighten Zach worse, so he didn’t say it.
He didn’t know where he was going, or even how. He knew it would be Birdland, the true Birdland that lay paradoxically far beyond the house and deep within it. But Trevor was realizing that Birdland wasn’t just the place of his past, the place in his childhood where he had found his talent, his dreams. It was also the place where his dreams could find him, and some of them were very bad. It was a place of scars, and of wounds that had never healed.
“Just don’t leave me here,” Zach murmured against his chest.
“I promise.”
Trevor remembered lying in bed this afternoon imagining Zach’s body inextricably linked with his, remembered his fantasy of Zach’s flesh flowing over him, surrounding him. He pressed his body up against Zach’s, wrapped his legs around Zach’s skinny hips. “I want you to fuck me,” he said.
“Huh? Now?”
“Yes. Now.”
Emotions were warring in Zach’s face: confusion, fear, sorrow, frustration, arousal. Trevor felt Zach’s penis growing cautiously hard against the back of his thigh. He reached down and cupped Zach’s balls, ran his hand up the silky shaft, streaking it with blood. Zach shuddered, took a deep breath. “Are you sure?”
But apparently he could see the answer in Trevor’s face. His eyes never left Trevor’s as he wet his hand with saliva and rubbed it up and down his penis, then lifted Trevor’s knees and spread his legs and eased in. The sensation was not so much painful as completely alien. Trevor felt his asshole trying to contract, his whole body trying to tense up. He sought Zach’s mouth and sucked at his tongue. He would have this boy inside him any and every way he could. It was time.